The Babcock family’s colonial saltbox house—its steep-pitched roof sloping from a high front to a low back—sat near what is now the intersection of Capitol Avenue and Lafayette Street in Hartford. The wooden house had a central brick chimney, and its front door opened to an entryway, with rooms branching off a central hall.¹ The architecture was simple, sturdy, and fortified with oak timbers that measured sixteen to eighteen inches.²

      As houses went, it was pretty standard, but the marvel of the property was outdoors. Just after the American Revolution, no one could explain the well on Dolly Welles Babcock’s one-hundred-acre farm, but even people passing through town knew about it. Dolly Babcock’s well is one of the first recorded stories from the neighborhood’s European history, and it illustrates the combination of luck and hard work that built Frog Hollow.

      A 1781 visitor described the Babcock well as preternaturally plentiful. When the well was dug, near today’s intersection of Park and Washington streets, “the water sprouted up with such amazing velocity” that workers could barely set the stones.³

      In fact, the gusher came so fast that the men digging the well had to scramble to avoid drowning. Only after they made it out did they realize they had lost more than a few tools in the gushing water. After the water was tamed, logs were cut and hollowed out to fit into one another, end to end. The person who cut and fit the pine logs—perhaps it was Nahum Carter, a Vermont sawyer—did an excellent job.⁴ In 1896 excavators unearthed some of the original wooden pipes and found the legend “1796?” carved into them. A law that was passed in May 1797 created a corporation “for the purpose of water into the city of Hartford, by means of subterraneous pipes, and their successors be, and they are hereby incorporated for said purpose, and made a body politic, by the name of The Proprietors of the Hartford Aqueduct,” which provided drinking water to Hartford residents who could afford twelve dollars a year per share.⁵ The proprietors included one Elisha Babcock, Dolly’s husband.

      The well was so famous that in 1847 the Courant reported that it frequently overflowed from its “perennial springs.”⁶ When more pipes were dug up in 1908, according to the Courant, they were said to have carried water so sweet that it was like the “drops of the morning.”

      The water company eventually dissolved, but not before it made the Babcocks wealthy.⁷ The family did not have to worry—as did fellow Hartford residents—about the source and quality of their water.

      While Dolly Babcock and her five children ran the farm, her husband, Elisha, ran a successful newspaper, the American Mercury.⁸ The first edition appeared on July 12, 1784, a Monday, and ran just four pages, with a half dozen columns per page printed in blisteringly small type. As was the custom for newspapers of that era, scant local news graced the paper and the national and international news that did exist was often days old. Traveling at the speed of horse and boat, news of an event in Washington easily took five days to reach the pages of the Mercury.

      The Mercury prospectus promised to “furnish a useful and elegant entertainment for the different classes” of customers.”⁹ In fact, early American newspapers weren’t news so much as reprinted gossip, letters from afar, and overheard tavern conversations. Most were, journalistically, little more than the throwaway, ad-heavy publications available at supermarket checkouts today, according to Older Than the Nation: The Story of the Hartford Courant, a 1964 book by John Bard McNulty. News wasn’t a publisher’s bread and butter anyway. The bills were paid by other print jobs taken on, or by selling notions at the publisher’s print shop. The idea of news judgment—or placing news in a newspaper according to its importance—was light-years away. The Courant ran the Declaration of Independence on page two, “in keeping with the printing custom of the times that arranged the news approximately in the order in which it arrived at the printing office,” wrote McNulty.¹⁰

      The Mercury and the Courant were two of the 180 newspapers that dotted the early American landscape. All told, the papers had a combined circulation of roughly twelve million and were vital to forming a sense of community.¹¹ Newspapers were the connective tissue between colonists and among the early Americans. Then as today they created a sense of place. They provided information, succor, and a sense of belonging. James Parker, of the eighteenth-century New Haven–based newspaper the Connecticut Gazette, wrote: “It is no wonder that a darling so carefully guarded and powerfully supported, should sometimes grow wanton and luxurious, and misuse an indulgence granted it, merely to preserve its just freedom inviolate: It has been tho’t safer to suffer it to go beyond the bounds that might strictly be justified by reason.”¹²

      But early American newspapers did not have long shelf lives, even in a city as hyperliterate and news-hungry as Hartford. Of the eight newspapers started in the capital city in the 1780s, only two, including the Mercury, were still publishing twenty years later.

      The Mercury did not survive by being tepid. Babcock’s paper was outspoken enough to offend a Federalist member of the clergy in Litchfield, Conn. In 1806 the Reverend Dan Huntington sued Babcock for “willful falsehood.” Despite multiple witnesses who testified in his favor, Babcock was found guilty and fined one thousand dollars. He pouted in the Mercury, “We live in a conquered country.”

      Furthermore, Babcock wrote, anxious to guard the freedom of the press (all spellings are his): “It does not hurt character nor feelings nor the Law to declare of certain republican clergy-men that they are ideots and apastates, nor to charge other republicans with swingling, forger, burglary, murder. So far from it law and religion are glorified by the very slanders. But turn the tables and a federal court and jury will discover that society is on the precipice of anarchy.”¹³

      Boldfaced names from American history frequently graced the Mercury’s pages. On May 10, 1790, Benjamin Franklin wrote in its pages to Noah Webster that he was surprised to find several new words had been introduced into “our parliamentary